{"id":5460,"date":"2015-02-09T06:27:41","date_gmt":"2015-02-09T11:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5460"},"modified":"2015-02-09T06:27:41","modified_gmt":"2015-02-09T11:27:41","slug":"first-known-when-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5460","title":{"rendered":"First Known When Lost"},"content":{"rendered":"

First Known When Lost<\/a><\/h3>\n

Last Thursday the journal Science published an article by four MIT-affiliated data scientists (Sandy Pentland is in the group, and he\u2019s a big name in these circles), titled \u201cUnique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata<\/a>\u201d. Sounds innocuous enough, but here\u2019s the summary from the\u00a0front page WSJ article<\/a>\u00a0describing the findings:<\/p>\n

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Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing Thursday in the journal Science, analyzed anonymous credit-card transactions by 1.1 million people. Using a new analytic formula, they needed only four bits of secondary information\u2014metadata such as location or timing\u2014to identify the unique individual purchasing patterns of 90% of the people involved, even when the data were scrubbed of any names, account numbers or other obvious identifiers.
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Still not sure what this means? It means that I don\u2019t need your name and address, much less your social security number, to know who you ARE. With a trivial amount of transactional data I can figure out where you live, what you do, who you associate with, what you buy and what you sell. I don\u2019t need to steal this data, and frankly I wouldn\u2019t know what to do with your social security number even if I had it \u2026 it would just slow down my analysis. No, you give me everything I need just by living your very convenient life, where you\u2019ve volunteered every bit of transactional information in the fine print of all of these wondrous services you\u2019ve signed up for. And if there\u2019s a bit more information I need \u2013 say, a device that records and transmits your driving habits \u2013 well, you\u2019re only too happy to sell that to me for a few dollars off your insurance policy. After all, you\u2019ve got nothing to hide. It\u2019s free money!\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First Known When Lost Last Thursday the journal Science published an article by four MIT-affiliated data scientists (Sandy Pentland is in the group, and he\u2019s a big name in these circles), titled \u201cUnique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata\u201d. Sounds innocuous enough, but here\u2019s the summary from the\u00a0front page WSJ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1543,338,483,3353,577,652],"class_list":["post-5460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-digital-surveillance","tag-freedom","tag-liberty-2","tag-metadata","tag-nsa","tag-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5460"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5461,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5460\/revisions\/5461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}